UMass Rescue Lab and ROOST launch new partnership
UMass Amherst’s Rescue Lab is proud to announce a new partnership with ROOST, a new non-profit organization. ROOST seeks to address a critical gap in child safety and digital safety by developing free, open-source safety tools for organizations of all sizes. ROOST’s work and partnerships seek to usher in a new era of collaborative, open-source safety innovation that makes basic safety tools more transparent, accessible, and pluralistic.
Software and systems for supporting the goals of child safety teams from industry and government are limited in several ways. First, most freely available tools are based on older technologies that have not adopted recent advances, such as machine learning. Second, commercial tools are priced for a niche market and more costly than most organizations have planned for.
The goal of the ROOST and Rescue Lab partnership is to collaborate to accelerate innovation in the realm of online safety, and to ensure that companies and organizations everywhere have access to the technologies needed to ensure basic safety protections in AI and online spaces, especially for child safety.
Through its work with ROOST, the Rescue Lab will help democratize software for child safety teams and investigators by developing and publishing free software that addresses these and other limitations.
Since 2008, the UMass Rescue Lab has been the premier computer science research group working to rescue children from internet-based victimization. Our work includes dozens of peer-reviewed publications on novel forensic techniques and the characterization of public CSAM-related activity. Our research and novel forensic methods are used by investigators across the US and in many countries around the world who rescue children from online exploitation. With the new partnership, we seek to continue to have broad impact in helping secure a safer world for children.
